Two Visions, Two Styles in One Race to the Finish
ORLANDO, Fla. — There is so little time, and Sen. John F. Kerry still has so many speeches left in him. As he hurtles across the country by charter jet and bus caravan in the waning days of his campaign for the presidency, he says the first thing, and sometimes anything, that comes to mind.
Dusk was lowering over central Florida one night last week when he took the stage before 5,000 giddy partisans chanting, "Ker-ry! Ker-ry!" in an Orlando park. He was midway through his stem-winder, savaging the Bush administration's handling of the chaos in Iraq, when a tropical gust whisked away a page of notes from his outstretched hands.
The sheet fluttered in the air for a second, then disappeared behind a row of Haitian immigrants pressed together at the edge of the stage. Someone retrieved the page, and the crowd began passing it back.
"Don't worry, let it fly away," Kerry said, waving them off. "I don't need it."
For better and sometimes for worse, the Massachusetts senator keeps straying from script as he tries to energize Democrats, win over uncommitted voters and edge out President Bush in battleground states.
The inner perfectionist in Kerry seems compelled to fill in every empty minute and blank spot on a page. Then he crams in more minutes and more pages. The speechmaking prowess that led him into public life three decades ago remains the most daunting weapon in his personal arsenal.
Yet with everything on the line, Kerry, the celebrated strong finisher, has turned out to be an elusive and inconsistent word master in the final stretch -- sometimes seeming incandescent and lyrical, at other moments baffling and uninspiring.
On a hectic campaign swing that took him from a Las Vegas casino to heartland stretches of Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio and down through Florida, Kerry was at his best when he seized the moment, firing up Democratic loyalists and connecting intimately with his roused audiences.
Ad-libbing to hundreds of seniors from a West Palm Beach retirement community who endured an unforgiving sun for him, Kerry dropped his rhetorical mask for a moment, as if echoing their own doubts.
"I know you're looking at me, you're trying to look right through me, right to my heart, asking, 'Can we trust this fella?' " he said. "Well I'm here to tell you: You can."
